COLLECTIONS

The artist abandons the classical duo “form & image” to set her artworks more and more free, linked only to materia by a genetic process. The painting technique and the usual materials disappear increasingly in order to make way for new experiences.

This is how the fascinating world of creation comes together in front of our eyes. It resembles, very closely, the formation through the geological eras: in the small of her studio Ester repeats the same procedure that nature continually implements in the making of universe. Her artworks come to life through unusual combinations of materials that blend and separate in a game of chemical reactions. Like this, she re-builds new landscapes according to nature.

While painting en plein air, Ester Negretti soon realized that using oil paints makes the gaze stop on the surface. Instead, she wants to invite the spectator not to stop at the image but to dig, to look deeply.

So, she started to gather materials on every place that inspired her: fabrics, sand, paper… she even uses the newspaper of the day with the specific purpose of telling the story of the site, its traditions and its people. The foreground of these landscapes is enriched with materials that invite the gaze beyond the canvas.

This series dedicated to boats, tells through primary colors about happy moments, but it also plays with the symbol of freedom that sailing boats represent.

Observing the movement of the gestures, the materials and the colors, it seems to feel even the sound of the waves breaking, the smell of the saltiness, the blue air that caresses the face and the sand under the feet. All the five perceptive senses are thus involved.

The landscapes of the lake are glimpses from the soul of the places that they represent. This is where nature sends transversal messages to involve us into the depths of our existence, until we understand that there is no separation between humanity and nature.

The traces of “living” materia alongside the natural colors of earth shape the artwork. As an archaeological find of the modern era, allowed back to the eye through an anthropological examination of urban waste, it helps to be conscious of being digging.

These artworks “sound” like questions and social warnings; in them the ideas circulate in a noisy, insistent, insinuating way.

Imprints could be compared to a series of portraits of individuals who have lost the need to be represented through the outward appearance and, therefore, become deliberately abstract signs.

The prints are thus an invitation to the viewer to go further, not to stop at the surface, to the recognizable objectivity that identifies them, but to go straight and without distraction to the totality of which everyone is part of… the essence.

In these paintings inspired by Michelangelo’s preparatory sketches, and not only, “the body goes on stage”, it exhibits in outer forms an inner dynamism. Sketched figures become shadows and light as they seek to free themselves from constricting geometric shapes.

Referring to the unfinished Michelangelo’s prisoners and sculptures, a metaphor of humanity, Negretti sees “men in chains forced into an immobility of shape”. But also men who fight, who want to get out of the shadows, from the spiral “of a black hole” that keeps them in a stagnant everyday life, made of little hope.

The compositional work based on the cartesian axes takes voice, more than ever, in this series of artworks entitled new geometries. The shapes explode, deflagrate one into the other by osmosis and matter gives life to the composition, while gold illuminates and fixes the ambivalence of structure. An apparent casual gesture is naturally controlled in its smallest details, as we do moving in the world overcoming or breaking down the obstacles of life.

Polymaterial totems saturated with painting, where shapes, colors, materials, lights and sounds interact with the surrounding reality, revealing its essence. Layered, burned and sculpted, the matter becomes the epidermis of sculpture through a painting that pushes the image to be reborn from its rubble.

A work based on the possible communicability between human beings. For Negretti, every sculpture is a “portrait” that deconstructs itself, a man who needs no longer his own identity, or any mask; an individual who, without an image, becomes an informal sign, pure Essence.

The main question concerns the possibility of ensuring a good, healthy, sufficient and sustainable diet for all humanity. Obviously various problems arise, related to the way on how man, especially in the last century, has intervened on nature, forgetting that the balance between resources and consumption is far from being achieved.

With a special focus on the theme of Expo (Life, Energy, Nutrition, Environment, Ecology), the cycle of these artworks concentrates on the respect of nature and the urgent need of recycling raw materials.

Artworks from 2003 to 2005. Ester worked on this series during a trip to Australia and also on her return. Particularly noteworthy are the works inspired by the bark of the phantom tree: a white wood that shows traces of life experiences. From this point new geometric abstracts will be born and the series of imprints will be prelude.

A journey within the history of art: starting from the early works on the period of her formation, which recalls the flemish art, after which Negretti crosses the impressionism with the painting en plein air to move foward onto a research of her own character through abstract structures, typical from Como rationalism.

Without forgetting her first love -the light that shapes the artworks of Leonardo- Negretti begins to use different materials, with the precise interest of studying how they shape the light on the surface of the canvas. From here, her paintings become more and more material and changing, characterizing her artworks since 2006.